Sounding Sculpture - Chicago, IL
Posted by: 
libbykc
N 41° 53.058 W 087° 37.294
16T E 448430 N 4637117
This sounding sculpture by Harry Bertoia is made of copper rods that make ethereal music when blown by the wind.
Waymark Code: WM11R2A
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 12/07/2019
Views: 8
This sounding sculpture is one of many made by artist Harry Bertoia that are designed to sculpt with sound as well as metal. It is displayed in the plaza outside the Aon Center in downtown Chicago where several other notable sculptures are displayed as well.
Here is a brief bio from a great NPR piece about the sculptures:
The sculptor was born Arieto Bertoia in Italy in 1915. He moved to Michigan as a teenager, where he went to college with some future heavy hitters: architect Eero Saarinen and designers Charles and Ray Eames. Bertoia was part of the team that designed one of the Eames' first bent plywood chairs. Later, Bertoia moved to a small town in Pennsylvania, where he designed his famous chairs for the furniture company Knoll. But Bertoia's real love was sculpture.
"As he worked with metal, he found occasionally that he would bend a rod and it would make a noise," says Twitchell. "And gradually he kept thinking. 'I wonder what would happen if you did this, I wonder what would happen if you did that?' What kind of sounds might come out."
Once Bertoia discovered that sculptures could make sound, he became obsessed — and built hundreds of them.
"I build sculptures that can move in the wind, or that can be touched and played, like an instrument," Bertoia said in an interview that aired on public television a few years before he died in 1978.
Construction Materials:
Copper-beryllium alloy rods welded to plates of naval brass and mounted on granite pedestals
Construction Date: 01/01/1975
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